Starts off with a guy in a cafe having peregrinations. He sticks his face in a river and eats some earth. He gets his fingers squished by a guy with a mallet. He lies naked under the cafe table and “toys and tugs idly at his dink.” There’s lots of severed things in here: severed heads, severed hands. A “nubile” fifteen-year-old girl goes for a romp in the forest, plays chess with a man, then eats him. Best passage in the book: “…the water cascading over mossy grey rock, yellow leaves shuttling by in the current like kayaks vomiting through congenial rapids.” Best story title: “A Hopper Full of Heads.” Above all, Scattered Among the Heathens is an absolutely over-the-edge celebration of purple prose: “Hands outstretched, head tilted back, the sky above is a sovereign nation of saints and martyrs processing before me in glowing gold, purple and orange vestments, the wide blue expanse radiating warmth and certainty in a genuine alignment of courteous love. I am baptized by breezes, glorified by charming scents and sounds and alone in paradisiacal splendour. Here my cranium prances and skirts, my heart swells and my guts feast on euphoria and sugary melons.” If you like that passage, you better get this chapbook, because almost every passage in it features at least one prancing cranium and one feasting gut.
chapbook / publisher: Black Bile Press / main creator: Matthew Firth / $3 / 1315 Niagara St., #4,Windsor, ON N9A 3V8